The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

doubted that he was right and his critics wrong.
His attitude towards public opinion is expressed in
the lines:
But there are not many who have this degree of
force in their inner life. To almost everybody
sympathetic surroundings are necessary to
happiness. To the majority, of course, the
surroundings in which they happen to find
themselves are sympathetic. They imbibe current
prejudices in youth, and instinctively adapt
themselves to the beliefs and customs which they
find in existence around them. But to a large
minority which includes practically all who have
any intellectual or artistic merit, this attitude of
acquiescence is impossible. A person born, let us
say, in some small country town finds himself from
early youth surrounded by hostility to everything
that is necessary for mental excellence. If he
wishes to read serious books, other boys despise
him, and teachers tell him that such works are
unsettling. If he cares for art, his contemporaries
think him unmanly, and his elders think him